Dave Asprey: Health Misconceptions and Empowering Personal Change | E136
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You had ejaculation studies and orgasm studies and the conclusion of which that a man should have one orgasm a week, that women should have as many as possible. Well, not quite. Let me tell you the numbers. This is from ancient Taoist teachings. It's your age in years minus seven divided by four.

Okay. So you would ejaculate once every 12 days or less if you want to maintain your life force. Or less. So ejaculating too often is bad. But why? When you ejaculate, your testosterone drops for about 48 hours and your prolactin levels go up. Those are both bad ones.

testosterone drives dopamine, which drives happiness and drives motivation. And prolactin makes you tired and lethargic. For women, orgasms do not diminish them. There isn't a negative hormonal response. It's a positive hormonal response. So if you're in a relationship and you ejaculate less, you're going to have more sex. Your partner is going to be happier and you're going to be happier. And your oxytocin levels go up for everyone. Everybody wins in that. You just have to get over the idea that you'll die if you don't ejaculate.

You're listening to my awesome interview with Dave Asprey, the founder of the biohacking movement. If you haven't listened to part one yet, be sure to check that one out first. Now, without further ado, here's part two of my awesome interview with Dave. So let's move into biohacking. You're the world's foremost biohacker.

or considered such let's yeah let's talk about um bulletproof coffee you had thought about you had had tea in the on your journey at some point with butter in it tell us about

kind of how that transformed seven or eight years later. You have the blog, then you had the company, then you have the coffee shop. What's the transition there? And feel free again to get into some of the science before we get into some of the details of the steps and the importance and ingredients of biohacking. When I was on that holy mountain in Tibet,

I was having all kinds of thoughts. I'd run a longevity nonprofit group near Stanford for six or seven years. I'd learned the techniques of anti-aging from my elders and people in their 70s with more energy than me. And I could never get anyone under 60 to come to a meeting. Every month, we'd have like the world's top experts in person for five bucks. And we're two minutes from Google's headquarters and they wouldn't come. So we need a rebranding.

And I looked at this, what's the word that's going to make longevity interesting for someone who's 19? And it's biohacking. And I spent six weeks coming up with this definition. It's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology.

And that means that if you want to be the world's fastest person, control of your biology. You want to be calm and not feel stress, control of your biology. You want to have enough energy at the end of the day to be a parent after your commute and your job, control of your biology. So this is a uniting element to bring neuroscientists and Navy SEALs and meditators and all the people working on being better human beings into a room with a common goal and different tool sets. Marketing is critical to explain what you're doing in one simple sentence that many entrepreneurs cannot do.

it's really hard to do. I have a unique advantage in that. In the days of Exodus,

I realized if I was going to be a good tech evangelist, I needed to learn how to public speak. So I started running the web and internet engineering program for UC Santa Cruz Extension. So for five years, I taught classes three nights a night on really cutting edge tech topics where I had an hour to absorb the topics and make a class that would last two hours in it. And I learned how to break information down. I became really good at absorbing, transforming, and teaching.

And this was really hard. My students were all master's degree engineers, and I'm teaching how to do horizontal scaling, how CDN networks like Akamai work, and just how to think about systems. And that five years of just hard work

gave me the skills in order to be able to explain things that are complex. The reality is your body responds to the world around you in thousands of invisible ways, but you can change the world around you almost effortlessly. And when you do that, how you feel and how you show up, how you look, it all changes. And it's funny, if you talk about longevity to someone who's young,

Living a long time is a great idea, but it's not number one on your list. It's how do I be more attractive? How do I build my career? How do I make my mark in the world? You're interested in sex and power. Money. Money too, which is an aspect of power and sex. So this is what we focus on. And you focus on building your community and your tribe. Those are going to be more important than health unless you're really sick. And they're more important than longevity. So old people care about longevity. And young people don't care about health unless they're sick. So I stopped talking about this.

And I talked about control over your biology, the ability to show up in the world the way you want, to have more energy. And one of the things is I tried every diet. I'd been a vegan. I'd been a raw vegan. And it made me really sick. And I came back from Tibet. I'd quit coffee for five years because I would always get jittery from it and feel this weird pressing in my chest and a headache. Well, I had a cup of coffee. And I was like, oh, my God, I love coffee. This is my life.

I'm cured. I'm not allergic anymore. Next day, I had another cup of coffee and I felt it. Wait a minute. It's not that I'm sensitive to coffee. It's that different coffee is different. And I did this deep dive into coffee and biology and agricultural science and realized the problem we had with mold in coffee. And when I could get a mold-free coffee, I felt great. And I remember I was in Denver giving a keynote, I think at RSA or some big tech conference and

And I drove across town to get the most likely mold-free coffee because I was just dying of jet lag or something. And I got moldy coffee. I don't even remember what I said. My brain was cooked. And I said, I'm going to have to make my own. So I did a little blog post. I was already blogging about biohacking. I said, anyone else want to try this lab-tested coffee?

I thought maybe the market size is zero. And I thought maybe a few people would try it. And it was just a runaway success because people like coffee that doesn't make them crash. Right. But we got to go back for a second because when I was doing the research, I'd never heard of mold in coffee before. I think of black mold. It's bad for you. It's in the walls. You have a flood. Mold is in coffee?

Turns out it's such a problem that most governments around the world have legal limits for the amount of mold toxin present in coffee. And the limit is 10 parts per million. What's mold exactly? Mold. So think about penicillin. Tiny little pill has huge effects on your biology. Penicillin is a mold toxin. Mold makes penicillin, but there's no mold in the penicillin. It's like a byproduct or it's what the mold produces. When you ferment coffee to get rid of the coffee cherry,

A toxin called OTA, or ocotoxin A forms. That's the beans are going into a bin? Or where are we in the coffee process? Well...

In the coffee process, when the coffee plant is stressed, bugs come in. Bugs are the vector for toxic mold spores. They penetrate the coffee fruit. Then the coffee fruit sits in a truck and it spoils a little bit. And then it sits for two days in river water or for two weeks on a tarp. And during that time, the mold grows and the toxins infused in the bean. They wash away the fruit, they dry it in the sun, then they ship it off and they rest it. Right. But

It's the formation of the toxin. So Europe and Japan and China and most of South America have a legal limit for this. And I have a former president of the Specialty Coffee Association on camera with me at my plantation in Guatemala saying, oh, I was in Japan when they rejected a thousand shipping containers full of coffee because the mold levels were too high. And I said, what'd you do with it? He said, we shipped it to the U.S. because it's legal there. There is no limit in the U.S. for that.

And people in the coffee industry got so outraged. We solved this problem years ago. My guys, that's not my lab test show. That's not what I feel when I drink the coffee. And I have people from your industry and from my industry saying that it's not true. And I have 36 scientific references showing that this toxin is present in most beans, that it survives roasting and it survives brewing. And it is a direct mitochondrial toxin. It triggers cancer in the bladder and in the kidneys.

And the easiest way people can know if there's mold in your coffee, you drink coffee and you have to pee a little while later and your bladder is not full. It's a bladder toxin. Your body's not dumb. It says, get it out, get it out. So if you drink coffee and you don't have to pee and then you pee when your bladder is full, you didn't have mold in your coffee. And there's... Is it that simple? It is that simple.

So the problem is a lot of people drink coffee. They're sensitive to it. Like I drink it, I get indigestion, I get jitters, I get a crash, I need sugar in my coffee. And then they drink Bulletproof coffee beans. By the way, I'm not with Bulletproof anymore. They fired me three or four years ago. I don't know what testing they do or don't do. Like I have no connection with Bulletproof. So when they drink mold-free coffee, you know, coffee company is Danger Coffee, they don't get any of those symptoms and they feel really good. And then let's talk about butter income.

But the mold thing is a real problem. And governments, for some foods, have levels that are allowed. There's an allowable level in corn, an allowable level in wheat, an allowable level in chocolate. Just in the US, we don't protect our people from it. So the world's worst coffee comes to the US and we feel jittery and we drink it. What's the scientific metric? Is it 0.06 of X or- It's 10 parts per million of ocratoxin A in the coffee bean.

That's the legal limit in most countries. Okay. And it turns out beer and wine has a lot of it as well. And so what's normal for non-bulletproof or non-danger coffee? It's all over the map. Is it a double? Is it a triple? In the U.S., why would you test? There's no requirement. And if you know about it, then you can just get sued later. So they literally are not going to test for mold in coffee in the U.S. because there's no reason to do it. It only creates liability. Me, I test every lot, right? And I do it on purpose because I want to drink it.

Okay, so you started Bulletproof Coffee. Tell us about the butter in that, and then tell us about the difference in the minerals in Danger Coffee and what the difference is. So Bulletproof was an interesting company because the market size for functional coffee was zero. I created the industry category, and it grew very substantially. I also made collagen into a billion-dollar industry. It was the first company to really focus on collagen.

And then MCT oil also became a billion dollar industry. I was the first guy to bring that. I was a cognitive enhancer. So what is that for people? MCT? MCT oil is an extract of coconut oil that creates ketones like a keto diet, and it makes people lose weight and it really enhances mental function.

And what I did, I've learned about that because of my work in the longevity field. The group I worked with, that Silicon Valley Health Institute, we were talking about using coconut oil in order to help your body have a better metabolism because of the ketones present in it because of MCT. So I found a way to extract just 5% of the coconut oil that had these special metabolic effects and the pro-cognitive effects. And it's a flavorless oil. And there's millions of people who put that in their smoothies and their coffee to this day. That was my idea.

Okay, so talk about the minerals in danger coffee and how it differs from bulletproof coffee. Okay. Let's talk about butter and bulletproof coffee. Let's back up for a second. Mm-hmm.

Trinity Ventures invested six million dollars in your series a or first round of bulletproof coffee. Yep You end up raising another thirty something million dollars of your equity debt is not a hundred. Yeah, ninety million ninety million dollars so Venture capital firms and Trinity invested in Starbucks was leading and still as a leading CPG VC firm said I'm gonna invest in

His lead, $100 million of funding and a coffee company? What? What happened there? Well. How is that possible? Trinity Ventures was a lead investor in Speedera. So they knew me from Speedera. And I said, I want to be an entrepreneur in residence. I said, come on in. So I had an office. Tell people what that is. Entrepreneur in residence at venture firms is a great gig.

They basically say, we're going to give you a business card that says you work for the firm. And you're going to spend six months or so finding a new company you want to work with. And we'll probably back the company because we know you and we trust you and we like you. So this is an honor to be in EIR for Trinity. And they'll give you a full salary, $250,000, I think. It's not a full salary. It's usually about a half salary. So I was making like $100 a year or something. Today, I think the going rate's $250,000 to $300,000. Probably, yeah. This was back in the day, right? Yeah. Thanks, Biden.

this whole inflation thing drives me insane. So I did that and I actually became CTO and co-founder of the first company to get heart rate from the wrist called Basis. And meanwhile, though, I'm at Trinity and I'm putting coffee in my butter. And one of the partners, Dan Skolnick, who's just a great human being and was a fantastic board member at Bulletproof, he sits down and goes, what the hell are you doing? I see you putting butter in your coffee in the break room. That's insane.

And I explained why and he tried it and he kept doing it and just said, wow, I really like how I feel on this. And then it turns out it didn't work when I was at Basis. I was there for a little while and I called up Dan. I said, look, you guys are never going to invest in Bulletproof because I'm in five different industry categories. I have a coffee shop, this, I've got beans and like, it's not a typical venture investment. And I know because I sit near partner meetings enough.

But you should give me like a hundred grand personally, because I need inventory dollars for coffee. Let me take a look at your numbers. And they come back and say, here's a million dollars. This is a venture capital. Man, if I send a deal with the devil, you know, if you take venture capital money, you're going to have to sell the company and you might lose control. So I did as much as I could to not lose control. Didn't succeed, obviously, since I got fared years later. But, um,

When we announced the funding, Dan wrote an email or not email post on medium. And he said, 60 days after I met Dave and I started drinking Bulletproof coffee, I sat down in my BMW at the end of the day and I started crying. Now, number one, venture capitalists don't cry, but he did. And I said, what? I didn't know this about Dan. And he said, the reason is that I've never told anyone.

I've suffered from crippling fatigue and brain fog every day of my adult life. And I never told anyone. And I could barely make it through my meetings every day. And this was the first day in my adult life that I went through the day without having one energy crash. And I was just so profoundly grateful that I could feel this good.

And I'm like, wow, this is true believers. And Dan was such a powerful board member and he talked me off the ledge lots of times when I'd get pissed off about something or just give me good advice because there's a lot I didn't know. And so Trinity invested because they knew me and because they felt different when they tried it. And this is a wacky idea, butter and coffee, what the hell? But the reason I was putting butter in the coffee is because in Tibet,

at about 18,000 feet elevation, a little to four foot tall Tibetan woman gave me yak butter tea. And I was feeling like crap. I mean, it's high altitude. I had chronic fatigue syndrome. And I drank this yak butter coffee, which is just yak butter, not coffee, yak butter tea, just yak butter blended into tea. I drank it. I felt really good, like tingly, like something woke up inside me. What is going on with this? And I went back to Silicon Valley, bought some tea, bought some butter, blended it up, tastes like crap, didn't work.

It must be the tea. So I spent $1,000 on all the different teas to try them. Nothing worked. So then I buy 25 kinds of butter. Two kinds of butter worked. Grass-fed butter. It doesn't work with industrial butter. And I said, okay, what if I try coffee? What if I get this mold-free coffee? And what if I add the MCT oil from the longevity place? And I ended up over hundreds of tests with coconut milk and all these different things, making something that tasted good and just was rocket fuel for my brain. I give to all my friends. Oh my God, what is going on? I really noticed this.

And my first blog post was, let me introduce you to biohacking. The second one was, let me introduce you to the recipe for Bulletproof Coffee. You need mold-free beans, you need MCT oil, you need some grass-fed butter. Now, I didn't make mold-free beans yet. The MCT oil you could buy wasn't very pure and it would make you get disaster pants.

And so I ended up just fixing those problems and just making products that my followers wanted and that I wanted. And that was off to the races. So what are the five big biohacks? Well, the biggest one is the hardest one to explain is forgiveness.

And forgiveness is not about telling someone you forgive them. It's about stopping yourself from being triggered by having negative thoughts about someone else. So someone's wronged you in business or in a relationship or something like that, and you just keep playing it back over and over. There is an absolute process you can measure in neuroscience to truly forgive something so it no longer costs you anything. If you do that, it creates the most energy, the most freedom, and the most happiness. And your body will change, your mind will change, and your life will change. It's just the hardest thing to explain.

That's years of therapy, by the way. No, you can do it in about five days. In fact, you can do a lot of it in five days. And you can do it usually in one hour with a therapist if you're using the right techniques. Not all therapy is the same. Most people think forgiveness is a thought. It has nothing to do with thinking. Forgiveness happens all in the chest. And you can measure it in changes in brainwaves. It's a felt state, not a thought. Most people say, I've forgiven them. They haven't. And I can measure that they haven't.

So that's a big one. And the second one is some sort of high intensity movement. And it's very short duration. If you want to transform the body, you need to send it a signal that it has to do something hard. And then it needs to also know that it has enough nourishment and enough safety that it's worth investing in becoming stronger. This is why overtraining is so bad for you. The next one is

Cold showers, right? Some sort of cold exposure. And there's two reasons for cold exposure. One is it helps your metabolism. But more importantly, doing something that hurts for one minute a day intentionally and consciously makes your dopamine sensors change so that throughout the day you experience joy and motivation with a lot less effort.

And in my new book, I call this BICEP, Brief Intentional Conscious Exposure to Pain. And humans have been doing this for thousands of years. And cold therapy is just an easy way to do it. And that one little bit of effort means the rest of your day is better. The next one that is so profound is neurofeedback. Throughout history, you want to learn enlightenment? Go sit in a cave for 20 years with a guru. And if you meditate just right, and they notice and they raise their eyebrow, and then you notice that, then you got feedback.

If people come to my clinic, they do neurofeedback a thousand times a second, the computer is guiding you. So your brain knows what to do to reach the state that you're seeking. And it's just so much faster. So neurofeedback. And if you don't want to do neurofeedback, breathwork is free. It'll also help you get there. So there's all these different techniques that work better than just meditation. And I'll just say, hurry up, meditate faster. You don't have life to live, but you still want the benefits of meditation. You can do it faster. So-

There's a woman in France named Jean-Louis Calment who lived to 122 years old. She's the oldest living person ever. And in your book, you said that we can all live to 180 years old. At least 180. At least 180. I think when people read that or hear you say it, they think Dave Asprey is crazy. Why are we crazy? Why are you crazy when you say that? If that woman...

in France had told people she's going to live to 120. When she was 30, they would have said she was crazy and she did it. And here's my deal. Our current best is 120 years about. I just want to do 50% better than our current best and have a hundred years and AI to do it.

And given that I've been in the longevity field for 25 years and I know the billions of dollars being spent, I talked to the leading longevity scientists. We are reversing aging. I just reset my central aging clock in my brain by 20 years. I've had gene therapy that takes nine years off my measured age.

And there is no reason that humans can't extend our life by 50% given what we already have in the bag and the things that are coming in just the next five years. I'm not alone in saying that. Ray Kurzweil has been saying it forever. He says that we'll reach aging escape velocity in the next couple of years. In fact, most of the leading futurists will agree with that. Bottom line is 180 is conservative.

That's just hard to process. Some people I know get old. My grandmother lived till she was 104 and she was there cognitively till 101 and then she was still there a little bit each year. But dementia happens as you get older and older. So how are we going to train the brain to not have these

scientific occurrences that have been occurring for the beginning of time. They don't occur for everyone. They occur for some people. And we know why they occur. In fact, I read a whole book about this with a thousand references. It's called Headstrong. And Alzheimer's is optional at this point for most of the causes of it.

Dr. Dale Bredesen has been on my show who wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's, and he talks about the causes. You can prevent those things. Even simple things like microdose pharmaceutical nicotine. People who smoke never get Alzheimer's. They just get cancer. Smoking is bad for you. But if you take just nicotine in tiny doses, since 1986, in at least 10 studies, reverses or prevents Alzheimer's disease. Are you talking about Zin and things like Zin? Yeah. Yeah.

So there's a reason you might want to do one to five milligrams of nicotine a day over age 40, especially because it mimics exercise in the body. And it means the brain is much less likely to get Alzheimer's. And most of the causes of dementia, they're well understood. You're eating a ton of toxins. You're eating a ton of seed oils. You're not getting blood flow into the brain. All of these are manageable. They don't take much work as long as you know they matter.

There are plenty of people in their 70s and 80s who are energetic and sharp. And the reason I really know this is because when I'm 26 and I have chronic fatigue and my brain doesn't work and I'm tired, Mike on my board of directors, who's 88, was calling me at 1130 at night, full of energy and more energy than I had. I'm like, if Mike can do it, I can do it. I think he just has home here danger coffee. He was calling you up. It happens. And the reality is a lot of people

get the diseases of aging. But if you look back historically, not many people got those. These are new. These are diseases of industrial food and toxins, and those are manageable. So what are the two or three main things that we can all do to biohack ourselves or to get increased longevity? I know you talk about a lot of different things, but you talk... There's a lot. One of the simplest things is learn how to get good sleep. Sleep hygiene is really cool. And

And the summary of everything I know about that is totally free. Sleepwithdave.com. Best marketing URL of my life. But I just put everything I know about sleep because I was a guy who got five minutes of deep sleep. I hated sleep. I was terrible at it. I get 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of round, which is more than most college students get. And you normally get worse sleep as you age. I get that almost every night, even if I travel nine time zones.

Because managing how you sleep is about setting up your environment so you sleep better. You measure it by your ring. By my ring. And before that, I used to sleep with a headband on to measure it. So it's profound that you can change your sleep. That'll make you live longer. Sleep is one. Learn how to be hungry sometimes. Intermittent fasting is a proven technique for increasing longevity. I age at around 73% of the rate of normal people because I take these things into account.

you probably should get your minerals and take your supplements. Take your vitamin date, vitamindate.com. It's another thing I created. You need to take D and K together. Most people are profoundly mineral deficient. The superfoods we're all eating that are mostly peasant foods remarketed, they suck minerals out of your bones and they give you metabolic weakness unless you put minerals back in the body. These are simple things to do. Eat more high quality animal protein than your body can use.

so that you don't lose muscle mass. And avoid artificial oils, avoid artificial colors and flavorings. Artificial oils being sunflower, safflower, soybean, corn, all these plant oils that no one's ever eaten. If you do that, you can measure how old you are. It's a four or $500 test for the biggest one in the field. And there are much more affordable tests that run as low as like $179. That'll tell you how old are you compared to your peers.

You mentioned fasting a lot in your career, and we could spend one hour on this. So talk to us in general, what's healthy and what do you think about these weight loss drugs like Ozembic? Is that the same thing? They're not the same thing. When you do intermittent fasting,

You are not eating for about 12 or sometimes longer hours. 12 could be 24 hours. And you don't need to do it every day. And you don't need to do it the same way every day. If you had a really stressful day, you probably don't want to do a long fast because a fast is a stress just like exercise is stress. A lot of people are over fasting after my first book. So I wrote Fast This Way to teach people how to modulate your fasting. So at least three days a week, skip breakfast or skip dinner.

And you will do much, much better from a longevity perspective. It saves you money and time too. If you have a hard time with that, you could put butter and MCT oil in your danger coffee and drink that at breakfast and you're still fasting. And this angers some people go, but calories, here's the deal. Fasting,

works because it keeps your body from raising insulin and it keeps your body your body from raising something called mtor and it turns out fat doesn't affect either of those you can have some fat while you're fasting and you still lose weight you still get the longevity benefits fasting the same effect as these new weight loss drugs like ozempic what do you feel about ozempic fasting doesn't work the same way as ozempic and the new weight loss drugs they're different mechanisms

If I was obese, I would absolutely use Ozempic 100% because being obese is so dangerous. And I say this as a 300-pound guy at one time in life. However, if you're on Ozempic, you must eat one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight that you want to be, no matter what, even if you're not hungry. And you have to lift something twice a week. If you do that, you will not lose your muscles. And low-dose Ozempic or similar drugs

They're profound longevity drugs. You want to live a long time? Microdosing Ozempic is a really good strategy. What most people do though, is they stop eating. They take Ozempic, they lose all their muscle mass and they lose some fat. And then there's metabolically screwed for a long time. So proper use of Ozempic is a miracle drug. Most people don't eat enough protein on Ozempic. Tell us about four years ago. About 20 years ago. I tried neurofeedback for the first time. So when you hook a computer up to your brain and see what your brain's doing, show it to your brain so your brain can change itself.

And I've worked with experts all over the world. 11 years ago, I opened 40 Years of Zen, which is in Seattle. It's a five-day brain upgrade program. We make our own hardware, our own software to teach people to have the same brain states as someone who's done 40 years of daily meditation practice.

And I've had about 1500 big entrepreneurs, family office people, celebrities come through and people say it's like the best plant medicine ceremony I ever had without the plants because you just get to go deep and edit the settings in your operating system so that everything feels easier when you're done because you're getting out of your own way. And that's been the number one thing for me that's allowed me to have multiple companies to not get just destroyed when Bulletproof did what it did.

All those things. So building resilience in humans and the ability to remain grounded as a leader when things are either going your way or not going your way. So you get to choose your state and stay there. Neural feedback is a way to do it. It's the most profound company of all the ones I've started. We're both serial entrepreneurs. And I want to talk about what it means to be successful and what it takes to be successful. Work ethic.

I've shifted my work ethic a lot. When I started Bulletproof, I was VP of cloud security at Trend Micro. I grew Bulletproof to about 20 million revenues while I had a day job. I just worked two jobs, slept four hours a night for 18 months straight. Probably not good for my longevity strategy. So be capable of working really, really hard and be mature enough to not do it.

You have to set aside time for health and wellness. You have to set aside time for relationships. I put them on my calendar. I assume my calendar says, if you don't set aside time for those and you're capable of working really hard because you care about what you're doing, you will work until you're unhappy and sick. We're wired to do that as entrepreneurs. So literally,

90 minutes in the morning, that's my biohacking time. I'm going to do something. I have a whole upgrade labs at home. I have all the toys. I'm going to do the ones that I feel like doing today. And then the evenings, I'm actually not going to take a call after 5.30 or 9 because I have a date with my girlfriend. And if someone texts me, I'm not going to answer it because I'm busy. And having the discipline with your time to have good friends, have community, there's been times in my life where I just never saw friends, didn't focus on relationships because I work, work, work. That's not why you're working.

Isn't it true you're supposed to work in your 20s and earn in your 30s? And as you get older, you have families and get a little bit more better work-life balance? If in my 20s, I had a little bit more wisdom, I would have set aside an hour a day to study meditation and relationships because I would have had a lot more money and a lot more happiness later in life. So in your 20s, you're capable of working really hard. You just don't know what to work on.

So study how to be a really good partner and study whatever personal development appeals to you. If instead of doing that, you study how to make money, just be an asshole that makes a lot of money. One of the things that's contributed to my success, one of the main ingredients, something I call extreme preparation. I teach it. I'm writing a book called Extreme Preparation. I want to be the most prepared person who's ever walked into that room. How important has preparation or extreme preparation been in your success? It's been very toxic to my success.

Sometimes I spend huge amounts of time preparing and it wasn't even what I needed to do. And what I've been cultivating over the years is what I'm going to call an inner knowingness. And there is an intuition and then there's an emotion and then there's a thought. I'm well prepared, but I'm not excessively well prepared when I go into a meeting and I have a team who prepares me with what I need to know. I want to be prepared enough and I want to be

I don't want to have spent so much energy on preparing ahead of time that I'm not present and reading the people in the room and thinking about the future. So I found that if I went down that route too far, I would be almost perfectionist. I'd stay up all night preparing the perfect slide deck, but then I'm exhausted when I go into the meeting.

So it was, how do I know that I'm prepared enough was the trick. And being over-prepared for me was almost like an act of paranoia. But being extremely prepared was a good thing. Figurato Mali, UFC champion, talked about getting a stem cell injection in his penis. You have also had a stem cell injection in your penis. What is that about and does it actually work? I've actually had five stem cell injections in my penis over time.

And having a young person's sexual function is profound. You feel very different when you do it. What's worked better for me, though, is something called the Wasabi Method, which is one of my other companies. We use a specific type of sonic shockwave that causes new blood vessels to grow. And you can add width or length almost at will. It's used medically as a treatment for ED, or it's used by biohackers as a way of enhancing function. And

It's ridiculous. If you have a penis that's not working very well, you can hack it. You can fix it very easily. And the stem cells are one of the ways to do it. I've had stem cells in every joint in my body. In my face, I've had my bone marrow taken out twice. And whenever I have them injected, I'm like, sure, inject some. There might as well. Ouch. They use lidocaine. You won't feel it. I think having curiosity is important. Oh, yeah. Ingredient of our success. And I want to talk about...

You studied for a while. You had ejaculation studies and orgasm studies. And the conclusion of which that a man should have one orgasm a week.

And women should have as many as possible. Well, not quite. Let me tell you the numbers. Yeah, let's go through the numbers. This is from ancient Taoist teachings. It's your age in years minus seven. I'm 55. So, subtract seven, you got 48, and then divide by four. Okay. So, what's 48 divided by four? It's what, 12? 12, 12 and a half. So, that means you would ejaculate once every 12 days or less if you want to maintain your life force. Okay.

Or less. Yeah, or less. So ejaculating too often is bad for that. But why? Here's why. Okay. When you ejaculate, your testosterone drops for about 48 hours and your prolactin levels go up.

Those are both bad for you. Testosterone drives dopamine, which drives happiness and drives motivation. And prolactin makes you tired and lethargic. So every time you're ejaculating, according to the Taoists, they're saying you lose life essence. And according to what we understand about hormones, there is an ejaculation hangover.

So I tried to disprove this. I don't want this to be true. Went through a year of trying the equation for my age. And they also say, if you want to live forever, just ejaculate once every 30 days as a man and keep your...

Keep your orgasm to less than an hour. Guys can have hour-long orgasms. It's ridiculous. So for a year, I published the data in Game Changers. I tracked my daily happiness and my frequency of sex and frequency of ejaculation. When as a guy, it's just like intermittent fasting. You're not going to die if you skip lunch. You're not going to die if you don't ejaculate. But it feels like you're going to.

So you learn how to do this and on strategically, she had to do it. There's all kinds of stuff written about this. Montauk Chia has been on my show as a leading figure in this. And what it turns out is you have huge amounts of energy. And I've had Uber drivers say, damn, I heard this on a podcast. Like I just started a new company. Like I got a $30,000 raise. Like there are people like your energy is just getting leaked out, especially if you're doing porn. And what you find is if you learn how to not ejaculate, you have sex a lot more. Now the Taoists will say for women, you know,

Orgasms do not diminish them. There isn't a negative hormonal response. It's a positive hormonal response. So if you're in a relationship and you ejaculate less, you're going to have more sex. Your partner is going to be happier and you're going to be happier. And your oxytocin levels go up for everyone and you maintain the ability to go again and again and again. Everybody wins in that. You just have to get over the idea that you'll die if you don't ejaculate. That's counterintuitive to how most people feel after sex. Sex has been known to be the most pleasurable experience that

On earth. When did I say not to have sex? I said don't ejaculate. So, all right. So, we got to get into this too because when I was reading about it, I'm like, Dave, who on earth as a man is having sex and not ejaculating? Why have sex? I don't... I personally would not understand the point of that. Well...

Neither would anyone I know, by the way. If you could go for two hours and your partner had a dozen like just earth shattering orgasms, soak the sheets entirely and was just fully exhausted and in a state of bliss you've never seen before, you wouldn't want to do that?

That would make me happy. But that's a function of just holding your ejaculation for a while till your partner experiences her pleasure. So what's wrong with that? So your partner has five orgasms and then you wait because you want to please. Well, five is a lot, I think, for some people.

Well, I think, I mean, we're going deep. We're going deep now. I've never, I've never heard of a woman having 20 orgasms during sex. Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, but I've never, I've never heard of that before. But I do think, huh? It definitely happens. Okay. You should have, let's see, you should have Kim and Nami or Emily Fletcher on the show. Okay. Brandy Love was on my show. She's one of the biggest adult film stars ever. Interesting episode. Not,

about what people think it's about. It's about the business of pornography and why people go into it. And it was fascinating. Entrepreneur. That's why she went into it. But, but I, I, once again, I just, I cannot imagine not doing both. Yes. You want to please your partner, but you also want to also experience your own orgasm. What if it was possible to have an orgasm without ejaculating? Is it? Yeah.

How? Well, this is what the teachings are. So there's a way of squeezing. I mean, maybe I'm just not educated. Well, there are classes. I've taken all the classes on this stuff. And what you can do is you can have whole body intense orgasms that don't involve ejaculation. And the benefit of this is you can go have sex for two hours in the morning and you're like, oh, we've got some time this evening. Let's do it again. And then do it again. And if you have a marathon sex session, you ejaculate the next day, you're probably not going to want to do it again, right?

Well, I mean, no. Most people know because your prolactin levels are high and your testosterone is low. No, I don't agree with you. Yes, you would have. No, I definitely don't agree with that. You're unusual. There aren't a lot of 55-year-olds who you can ejaculate every single day after two hours of sex. So congratulations on being that healthy. Well, I'm not saying I'm mad. I really don't want to. I mean, some days I feel great. He's blushing. Some days I feel great. I want to keep going. And some days it's like, it's enough. I'm tired. It's...

You know, a lot of energy. Exactly. So it is a lot of energy. What you'll find is that when people go down this path, they guys have profound amounts of energy. Like they become really productive and you have so much more sex. Like there's a lot more sex, right? And it's enjoyable. And since now it's not about me, it's like, what are we capable of doing together? And I am going to feel great amounts of pleasure. I'm going to have multiple orgasms. I'm just not going to ejaculate.

And maybe I will once a week or whenever I feel like it. So the problem was, Taoist never made an equation for women in all of the research. So I figured out the equation. I took a lot of research. And it's the number of orgasms until she feels like she's going to die plus two. Okay, so let's make this practical. So...

The bottom line is as a guy, you want to be able to go and feel great pleasure and have a ton of fun sex until she just can't take it anymore. And then a couple more because 20% of people report meeting God during sex when it's really good sex, but few people have the skills, just the sexual skills, much less the relationship skills to create a safe space and all that. So it becomes play when it's just not about getting off. Like I'm going to have tons of orgasm and experience all the pleasure and

It's just like intermittent fasting. The first time you go 24 hours without eating, you're like, oh my God, I thought I was going to die and I didn't. It turns out I felt great. So go a week to say, I'm not going to ejaculate this week. I'm just going to have sex every single day. Watch what happens to your partner. You and me, we're founders, entrepreneurs, and you have said...

If you coach an entrepreneur, and if he, we're talking about males, can have sex and not ejaculate for some period of time, his career will skyrocket as opposed to him having normal sex every day. Yes.

I'm just calling it like I see it. Right? I'm not alone in this. So some entrepreneur comes in, he's a young man, comes in. Dave, what's your advice for me to be successful? Is that part of what you actually tell people? If it's something you're honest? I'm going to say, talk to me about porn.

But I'm going to say, talk to me about porn. If they're using porn, they got to stop. That stuff is so bad for your motivation, your dopamine. It just doesn't work. I'm going to tell them to do a cold plunge or cryotherapy, right? And you talk about mindset. I'll tell them that. Absolutely. Talk to me about your love life.

Right? Because this is a major variable. If you look at what people need, we need to feel safety. We need to feel nourished. We need to feel love. And sex for adults is part of love. It's not the only part of it, but it's an important, it's a source of nourishment for us. And if you're not paying attention to those things, you're not going to show up for your business in the right way. Right?

If you're running your business out of fear because you're bullied or to prove you're good enough so you're worthy of love, you can build a business that way. You just hate your life while you're doing it. So I'm like, yes, become an epic lover. Stop wasting your energy by ejaculating every time. Make her ejaculate every time and then you do it once a week and watch how your life changes. The amount of creative energy that a man is capable of when he knows how to hold his energy that way, it is profound.

And I'm not alone in this. All of yogic teachings in Ayurveda talks about this. All of traditional Chinese medicine talks about this. Taoism talks about it. Tantra talks about it. We just don't know it in the West. But this has been written about for thousands of years. I didn't invent this. I just tried to disprove it and became a believer when I couldn't disprove it.

So let's talk about something else that is highly enjoyable. You mentioned nourishment. Let's talk about food. I love food. What are the five best foods you can eat to be healthy and to biohack and live longer? What are the worst five? The best five are grass-fed beef or ruminant animals, like things like sheep and bison and things like that. Butter, coffee. Regular coffee, okay.

Better than no coffee, but mold-free coffee would be good. I'm not going to date you, obviously, but I'm biased. Latte okay to fall within that category? Latte is bad because of the milk.

It's probably bad because of the milk, if it's normal milk. The milk we have in the West is called A1 protein from cows that ate corn and soy, and it actually causes a lot of allergic problems and inflammation in people. Some people can handle it, but most people, milk is a problem in the latte. So I would say put butter instead of milk. It'll be much happier. And after that, it's blueberries and wild caught, like sockeye salmon or something like that. So these are fatty foods.

good quality fat foods, and high polyphenol foods. Those are most important. And don't worry about the mercury in fish because I know your thoughts about fish have changed over the years. Wild-caught sockeye only lives for two years and it's mostly freshwater. So it has the lowest pesticide, the lowest plastic, and the lowest mercury and very high omega-3 content. That's why I specifically like that kind of salmon. Worst foods? Worst foods...

Anything that's a replacement for meat made out of highly processed food. So impossible burgers beyond meat, stuff like that. The fact that it tastes just like meat, but it punches you in the gut just like peasant food, which is what it is, is a bit of a problem. Another one would be anything containing omega-6 oils, where canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, those are so bad for you. I mean, that's everything.

not the way I eat, but it is most prepared foods. And there's a reason we have diabetes and cancer everywhere. It's because these oils are not suitable for human consumption. They're bad for you.

And I haven't eaten them in 15 years. I'm 4.8% body fat and I used to be 300 pounds. And it takes about two years to replace half the fat in your cell membranes. So avoiding or at least heavily minimizing those is important. And you think about it, you take one fish oil pill, it has all these good benefits. Why is it that an equivalent amount of bad oil wouldn't have bad benefits? It's that bad for you, especially if it's a restaurant fried oils that have been totally destroyed.

Anything that contains artificial flavorings or colorings, these are provably bad for your brain, like really bad for your brain. So I'm describing most processed foods right now. And then the one that's going to surprise people is what we'll call high oxalate foods. This is spinach, kale, beets, and even raspberries, sadly.

Oxalates cause 70% of kidney stones. Plants cause them, not animals. And there are huge numbers of people with urinary tract problems and all sorts of pain in their body, gout, unexplained pain, skin problems that are just caused by plant toxins. And oxalate is one of the big ones. So spinach and kale are not superfoods. They're bad for you. Alcohol.

Alcohol is bad for you, but it's fun. So I do it once or twice a year. And what do you mean you do it? I think I'll drink something that's really good, like great sake or wine as old as I am or something. But I don't do one drink a week because it ruins your sleep for at least one night. And it is a pro aging pro cancer compound.

And there are better ways to feel good. If you want to go to a party and feel relaxed, have some true kava. It does all the good stuff of alcohol and none of the bad stuff. Or have a microdose of mushrooms or something. That's at least good for your brain. But going out and drinking wine because you like it, I don't care if you like it. You could go out and have heroin because you like it. It's still not good for you. So I just, I don't understand drinking alcohol knowing how much metabolic damage it does. I

I understand the desire to drink it. Do something better. If I am going to drink, I'll protect my liver and I'll take a probiotic that stops alcohol from turning into aldehyde, which is the primary cause it ages your tissues so rapidly. Let's move on to your lab. Upgrade labs. Upgrade labs where you have made the claim that going in for a five minute workout three or four days a week is better than going to the gym for some obscene amount of time and

Explain what it does and how on earth could that be possible? All right. Upgrade Labs uses data and AI

To help you get to your goal as fast as possible using the technology of biohacking. Okay, and just to tell people, this is a physical location. I think you have seven now. We have 30 locations signed. 30. It's a franchise. You can go to ownandupgradelabs.com and open one in your neighborhood. And what Upgrade Labs does is we bring in all the technology I've worked with for years that's used by super athletes and celebrities and Navy SEALs and things like that that radically change how your body responds.

So we do things like PEMF and cryotherapy and neurofeedback. And we use AI to help you build muscle because lifting weights works, just doesn't work very well. But cardio is the biggest one. If you were to do an hour of cardio a day, five days a week for two months, we think you'd be strong, right? Your VO2 max, which is a measure of how effective it is, it'll go up by 2%. You're gonna work your ass off, sweat all the time, feel good about yourself, but you don't really get very good results.

Come to Upgrade Labs and use our AI bike. Five minutes, three times a week. You will not sweat. You don't have to change clothes unless you're wearing a dress because you got to sit on the bike seat. And...

Doing that, you'll improve by 12% your VO2 max. Six times better results than five hours a day and 15 minutes a week. You're on a bike. You're on a bike. That's it? You're on a bike, but the bike is reading your heart rate and you're wearing headphones to tell you what to do. And it's modulating the stress on you. As it turns out, you don't change by doing lots of work. You change by working really hard and then quickly returning to baseline.

So we're actually guiding you to do breathing exercises after a very brief sprint to quickly drop your heart rate. So the body goes, oh, I might need to go fast, but now it's safe for me to transform. 12% VO2 max improvement is equal to adding two years to your expected lifespan

And you could kick your ass in a spin class and wear out your hips and knees, feel good about yourself if someone yells at you in sweaty spandex, and you're only gonna improve 2%. So come to Upgrade Labs and we'll take care of your cardio and you have so much time left over. Why don't we train your brain with neurofeedback?

Why don't we put you on our whole body red light therapy bed that changes how your cells work electrically? There's so much stuff you can do. You're just wasting time at the gym. It's better than not going to the gym. It's just not very effective on a permanent basis. And I got shit to do. What's your advice to parents who have children? What should they be doing health-wise for their kids? I've taught my kids that you control how you feel with what you eat. And okay, try and eat that and see how you feel.

And one of my biggest parenting moments was when my kids were five or seven or something. They'd food chain the nanny. And I said, guys, we're going to go to McDonald's. And they looked at me and they said, daddy, you can take us to McDonald's, but you can't make us eat. I'm like, what are you talking about? And they said, we know how our tummies feel when we eat that way. We don't want to do it. It doesn't matter if it tastes good. So teach your kids. They have control over their state and kids want control more than anything else.

And let them eat the bad stuff and see how they feel. Talking about the blue light glasses that you wear, you, you, you wear them on a plane. I think you wore them when you walked in today and you just came from Norway and you said, no, no hangover jet lag and all that jet lag from the flight. So light is an important nutrient and timing signal for the body.

And we get huge amounts of blue light indoors. And some blue light is good for you, and others is not good for you. So I started this company about 12 years ago called True Dark. We make glasses that block only the bad blue and allow the good blue in. And we make glasses for sleep at night that tell the body that it's dark, even though you can still see.

And this is why I don't get jet lag anywhere on the planet. And I wear these because my eyes stay younger. My bright studio lighting doesn't bother me. And you actually feel great at the end of the day when you haven't been exposed to huge amounts of toxic blue light.

Where can we buy them? It's at truedark.com. True dark. And people report huge benefits. And we just released a study for the ones for sleep. 15 minutes wearing those glasses is the same as meditating. It drops high-speed brainwaves, increases alpha waves just by wearing the glasses. You wear them for a half hour before sleep and you get better sleep at night. And you wear these during the day, your energy levels stay constant because your brain doesn't get tired from crappy lighting.

They really were. Oh my God, yeah. How many pair have you sold since you started the company? I don't have a number, but it's a lot. And when people talk about it, I don't market them heavily. Just people feel different when they wear them. So it's been life-changing for me. LED lights at a typical office, they just knock me out after a while. I just get tired. I wear these and I don't get tired. So as we conclude today, I always finish my show with a game called fill the blank to excellence. Are you ready to play? I'm ready to play. My number one professional goal is...

My number one professional goal is to help a lot of people learn how to be happy. My number one personal goal is... My number one personal goal is to get as close to being fully enlightened as I can in this life. My biggest regret in life is... My biggest regret in life is not learning forgiveness earlier on because I used to be kind of an asshole. My biggest fear in life is... I don't run on fear anymore. I couldn't answer that one. Is fear a great motivator?

It's a great way to get going if you let it motivate you. It'll eat you up. The funniest thing that happened in my career is... The funniest thing that happened in my career is in 2014, a Norwegian man was arrested for smuggling grass-fed butter into Sweden for Christmas baking because I created a global shortage of butter. That is actually hilarious. Did he go to jail? Yes. For how long? For butter smuggling. I don't know how long. God, I sure hope you paid for his legal expenses. Yeah.

Oh, that's crazy. The best advice I've ever received is? The best advice I ever received was from my friend Ken. When I told him about a narcissist senior executive I had who was eating up my company culture, he looked at me and he said, Dave, we're going to fire her with my phone or yours. Didn't take his advice and it probably cost me a hundred million dollars, but it was great advice. If you could work with one person in the world to improve their health, that person would be?

If I could work with one person in the world to improve their health, that's a really good question. Who would it be? It might be the Dalai Lama. It'd be interesting to do some life extension stuff with him. That would be one answer. The other one would be, it'd be interesting to work with Kanye on his brain and do some neurofeedback. He's an incredible artist and clearly has his moments, but I feel like there's so much untapped potential in there.

The one thing people should do to improve their mental health is... The number one thing people should do to improve their mental health is learn how to sleep. We could talk about this sleep issue for a long time. I'm a terrible sleeper. Oh, God, we could hack that for you. But what would the one main thing be...

Is it turning off your phone before you go to bed? Is it wearing your glasses? Is it meditating for an hour before you go to bed? There's two things. Don't eat after the sun goes down, or at least eat as early as you can. And number two, either turn off the lights and have red lights or wear the two dark glasses before you go to bed. Light and food are what are keeping you from sleeping. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time but haven't is...

The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time but haven't is I haven't visited Bhutan yet, a kingdom where they have a gross national happiness product. So it's on my list, and I'll probably go do it. What are the three things on your bucket list that you haven't done? I haven't lived to 180 yet, but I'm working on that.

I haven't done all of the cognitive upgrades that I think I'm capable of yet. So I don't yet know all of the levels that my brain is capable of, but I'm working on it. And the third one? On a bucket list, I haven't done yet. Haven't yet been to Patagonia. It seems kind of interesting. Otherwise, I've done a lot of cool stuff. One piece of advice that I would go back and give my 21-year-old self is? The one piece of advice I would give my 21-year-old self is?

is that you have control of your own biology. It's not there's something wrong with you. It's that there's something wrong with your body. If you could meet one person in the world, who would it be? I've met a lot of really cool people in the world who I've not met. I haven't sat down with Elon yet. I've sat down with Kimball a couple of times, but it'd be really fun to chat with Elon for a little while.

If you were the president of the United States in the next election, the first thing you would do is? If I was the president of the United States, you're saying elected? Sure. You're elected. You're named tomorrow the president of the United States. What's the first thing you would do? I would resign because I like to get shit done. It's a hopeless job. The one question you wish I'd asked you is?

We didn't talk at all about women's health or fertility. And these are massive issues. My first book was on fertility and how to have a healthier baby. The fertility rate is so low right now. And the toxins that affect all of us are affecting women more than men and it's affecting the next generation. And this is something that we need to talk a lot more about. The incidence of autism in kids is going up. Health problems in kids is going up. Bobby Kennedy's talked a lot about this in his campaign, but there's

There's a huge problem in our children's health that needs attention. And there's a huge problem in our women's health. They get Alzheimer's twice as much as men. And we got to do something about that. It's our job as a society to take care of our women and children. There are endocrine disrupting chemicals made by mother nature. Toxic mold makes a lot of them. Some plants make them.

But man-made fragrances, something called atrazine, which is allowed in the US but banned in most other countries that turns frogs into hermaphrodites, it provably affects humans at the levels that are in our drinking water.

And your job as a parent is to do what you can to reduce your exposure to household chemicals and eat the cleanest food you can afford, to bind toxins if you're going to get pregnant or you're pregnant, and to do your best to feed your kids the food your ancestors ate, not pre-processed garbage food. If you do this, your kids' chances of having autism, ADHD, allergies, childhood illnesses, all the stuff I dealt with, they don't have to have it.

And if you see someone on the street who's pregnant, like open a door for them, just be kind. We don't have enough mothers right now. We don't have enough babies right now. And our babies and mothers aren't healthy enough. So just do your part in society. When you see someone who's working to make the next generation, give them a helping hand like that alone, just feeling supported. It's so profound. And if you're a woman,

at perimenopause, for God's sake, see a functional medicine doctor and get on bioidentical hormone replacement. The sooner you do it closer to menopause, the lower your risk of dementia later in life, the lower risk of cancer later. All the fear mongering you heard about that it was all based on using synthetic drugs. The bioidentical approach helps women at least as much as men. Hey, this has been awesome.

I really appreciate you being on my show. I've been a fan for a long time. I'm glad we got to sit down today. You're a brilliant guy. Thanks. You're positively affecting the lives of truly millions of people. And I learned a lot today and I'm going to change some of my own habits here. It's a lot of fun. Not the sexual habits, but I'm going to change some of the other ones. Give me one week. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Randall. Thank you.